Birds: My Antidepressant

Yesterday morning I had to run out and collect my oldest son from a sleepover at a friend's house so that we could make it to a doctor's appointment. Ordinarily it might be a bit annoying to retrieve someone at eight in the morning, but it was sunny (finally!) and cold and the route to his friend's house is a scenic one. I was feeling really out of sorts, as I have been for a while now, so the drive helped. At one point I was driving on a road beside a creek and when I came around a bend, I saw this group of ducks having a morning swim. The female ducks were the loveliest ducks I've ever seen -- not the usual duck variety, I guess. They were these beautiful shades of brown and tan and creme. I don't know what it is about birds, in particular, that always makes me feel better.

Things have been difficult lately, especially just in my head and in my heart, and my drive made me realize I need to attract some birds to my yard. I wish I understood why they bring me such joy...but I guess I don't really need to understand it to enjoy them. Somehow the opportunity to watch birds fly in and take some seeds and leave gets me out of my own head. At our old house we had a bird feeder on our deck and plenty of tall trees in our yard; winter there was a little more enjoyable than it might otherwise have been because it was a great season for bird watching. The boys loved it. The cats really loved it. We called it Cat TV.

At this house, we don't have a collection of tall trees, though the neighbor has a huge tree right on the property line that drops all its leaves in our yard. Also, we live on a busy street, which doesn't endear us to the birds at all. We have a dog now, who seems to think that birds are flying intruders, and that he, the Protector, must rid our yard of them. Two years ago, when we first moved here, we had a huge gray cat who lived outdoors, and he was quite the hunter. I think the birds innately understood this. The only bird I saw hanging around our backyard, a bold mockingbird, eventually met with an untimely death. I found some feathers by the garage door one day and announced that I thought Gray & White (yes, that's what we called him) had killed the mockingbird. Apparently everyone else already knew this and had tried to hide the evidence from me. To our great sadness, Gray & White disappeared a year ago...

Somehow, birds just make me feel better. Many winters ago, after a terrible miscarriage, it was the bluebirds who brightened my depressed days. And so I think I will take some Christmas money and go buy a bird feeder.